Mt.Gox creator Jed McCaleb lost around $50,000 to the site, never met Karpeles

Speaking with Ars Technica, Mt.Gox founder Jed McCaleb revealed that he personally lost around $50,000 in the Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange’s collapse. Although he sold he site to French bitcoin entrepreneur Mark Karpeles in 2011, McCaleb retained a 12% stake in the company.

Unlike many Mt.Gox users, however, McCaleb’s losses were in standard fiat accounts, rather than in BTC. It seems even the founder and minority stakeholder in Mt.Gox was storing his coins elsewhere.

Perhaps more surprisingly, McCaleb noted that his interaction with Karpeles has been entirely online, and he has yet to meet the Mt.Gox CEO in person.

I met [Karpeles] I think on bitcointalk.org. The Bitcoin community was very small at that time and I asked him to do some software development for me. He did that task and I was looking for someone else to run Mt. Gox so I could focus on other things. We discussed the possibility of him buying Mt. Gox from me and I ended up selling it to him in 2011.”

McCaleb’s 2011 split from Mt.Gox appears to have been complete, save for the access to his share of the profits as a minority owner. Even his original code, originally designed to trade Magic: The Gathering cards, is no longer a part of Mt.Gox.

It is my understanding that Mark also rewrote the entire codebase sometime in 2011 shortly after the sale and none of my code remained in use. Aside from the sale, I have never received any distributions or profits from Mark.”

McCaleb added that even though he retains a small stake in the company as part of the sale, he has had no connection to its operations since handing over the keys to Karpeles three years ago. Although he did give his nod of approval to would-be Mt.Gox rehabilitators Sunlot Holdings, his only recent connection with the company has been to be named in, and dismissed from, from Mt.Gox lawsuits. McCaleb has spent most of the last few years working as a developer for the Ripple cryptocurrency.